Tag: From the Bookshelf
Irenaeus on the Fourfold Gospel Tradition
In the third book of his work, Against Heresies, Irenaeus takes up a defense of the fourfold Gospel tradition. This defense proceeds as follows: It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live,…
James Dunn on Faith and Scholarship
To complement the current series on faith and scholarship over at Café Apocalypsis, we might note some interesting comments from James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered. Dunn favorably mentions Gadamer’s alliance with “those who want to maintain that faith is not in principle at odds with the hermeneutical process in its application to the study of the…
Jesus and History
In his Jesus Remembered, James Dunn makes the following, insightful observations about the interplay between the study of Jesus and the study of history: For those within the Christian tradition of faith, the issue [of Jesus’ relationship to history] is even more important. Christian belief in the incarnation, in the events of long ago in…
A Hermeneutic of Love
Communication is hermeneutical; it involves people sending and receiving messages. To make the communication process work, the sender(s) and receiver(s) both have to meet their own particular, communicative responsibilities. Of course, with literature like the New Testament, the people who sent the messages it contains cannot clarify or supplement anything they have already said. So,…